Secret Place (9780698170285)

by French, Tana

  “Right. With Joanne’s hand up her arse.”

  “Why would Joanne want to get you lot in hassle?”

  Eyebrow. “You didn’t notice that she’s not exactly our biggest fan?”

  “Yeah,” Conway said. “We noticed. Why’s that, again?”

  Julia shrugged. “Who cares?”

  “We do.”

  “So ask Joanne. Because I don’t.”

  “If someone was pissed off enough with me to try and get me expelled and arrested, I’d care why.”

  “That is why. Because we don’t care what Joanne thinks. In her tiny mind, that’s like a mortal sin.”

  Conway said, “Not because Selena was going out with Chris.”

  Julia mimed banging her forehead off her palm. “Oh my God, if I have to hear that one more time I’m going to stick pens through my eardrums. It’s a rumor. Like, first-years know not to believe everything they hear unless there’s actual proof. You don’t?”

  “Gemma saw them. Snogging.”

  Flash of something, just the one: that had caught Julia off guard. Then a finger-wag. “Uh-uh. Orla says Gemma says she saw them. Which isn’t the same thing.”

  Conway leaned back against the wall beside Julia’s bed. Held up the bag and tapped it with a finger, watched it spin.

  “What’s Selena going to say, if I give up on you and go ask her? You know I don’t ask nicely.”

  Julia’s face pulled tight. “She’s going to say the same thing she said when you asked her last year.”

  Conway said, “I wouldn’t bet on it. You have to have noticed: Selena’s not the same as she was last year.”

  That hit home. I saw Julia weigh something up, stacking and balancing. Saw her decide.

  She said, “Selena wasn’t the one going out with Chris. Joanne was.”

  “Right,” Conway said. “You say she was, she says Selena was, me and Detective Moran get to play Here We Go Round the Rumor Bush till early in the morning.”

  Julia shrugged. “Believe it or don’t, whatever. But Joanne was going out with Chris for a couple of months, before last Christmas. Then he dumped her flat on her arse. She didn’t like that one little bit.”

  Conway and I didn’t look at each other, didn’t need to. Motive.

  If it was true. This case was jammed with lies, couldn’t grab hold of it without getting a handful.

  Conway said, jaw hardening, “How come no one said anything about this last year?”

  Shrug.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Conway didn’t move, but the line of her spine said she was ready to shoot through the ceiling. “This wasn’t about someone smoking in the jacks. This was a murder investigation. Everyone just decided not to mention this? Are yous all morons? What?”

  Julia’s eyes and her palms turning up to the ceiling. “Hello? Have you noticed where we are? You found out about Joanne’s key, so the first thing she did was turn it around on me. If anyone had told you about her and Chris, she’d have done exactly the same thing: got back at them by dragging them into the shit with her. Who wants that?”

  “So how come you’re telling us now?”

  Julia gave Conway the teen slouch-stare. “We did Civic Responsibility this year.”

  Conway had her temper back. She was focused on Julia the same way she’d been on that sandwich. “How do you know they were together?”

  “I heard it around.”

  “From who?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t remember. It was supposed to be this big secret, but yeah, right.”

  “Rumor,” Conway said. “I thought even first-years knew not to believe everything they hear. Got any proof?”

  Julia scraped something off the frame of her Max’s poster. Balancing things inside her head again.

  She said, “Yeah, actually. Sort of.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I heard Chris gave Joanne a phone. A special phone, so they could text each other without anyone finding out.”

  “Why?”

  Another shrug. “Ask Joanne. Not my problem. Then when he dumped her, I heard she made Alison buy the phone off her. I’m not swearing on my mother’s life or anything, but Alison got a new phone after last Christmas, all right. And I’m pretty sure she hasn’t changed it since.”

  “Alison got a new phone? That’s your proof?”

  “Alison’s got a phone that Joanne was using to do whatever she and Chris did over the phone, which I don’t even want to think about. Obviously I bet she erased all the texts after Chris died, but can’t you guys do something about that? Get them back?”

  “Sure,” Conway said. “Why not. Just like on CSI. Did Civic Responsibility class remind you of anything else you should be sharing?”

  Julia put a finger to her chin, gazed into space. “You know, I honest to God can’t think of anything.”

  “Yeah,” Conway said. “I figured. You let us know if you do.” And opened the door.

  Julia stretched, slid off the bed. “See you round,” she said to me, with a little grin and a wave bye-bye.

  We watched her down the corridor and into the common room. Julia didn’t look back, but her walk said she felt our eyes. Her arse was mocking.

  Conway said, “Joanne.” The name fell into the silence. The room spat it back out, snapped tight shut after it.

  “Means, opportunity, motive,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, maybe. If everything pans out. If Chris dumped Joanne, that’d explain why she was such a bitch about him liking Selena.”

  “Specially if he dumped her for Selena.”

  “It’d explain why Joanne’s gang hate Julia’s, too.”

  I said, “They’re using us. Both lots.”

  “Yeah. To get at each other.” Conway, hands shoved in her back pockets, still staring where Julia had been. “I don’t like being some little rich kids’ bitch.”

  I shrugged. “As long as they’re giving us what we’re after, I’m grand with them getting a bit of what they want as well.”

  “I would be, too. If I was positive we had a handle on what they want. Why they want it.” Conway straightened up, took her hands out of her pockets. “Where’s Alison’s phone?”

  “On her bed.”

  “I’ll confirm with Alison where she got it. You search this.”

  The thought gave me the heebie-jeebies: left alone here, surrounded by teenage girls and knickers that said MAYBE on the arse. Conway was right, but: we couldn’t leave Alison’s phone for someone to get rid of it, couldn’t leave this room till we’d searched it, and Conway was the one who knew her way around to look for Alison. “See you in five,” I said.

  “Any of them come in here, you go straight into the common room. Where you’re safe.”

  She wasn’t joking. I knew she was right, too, but the common room didn’t feel like such a safe place either.

  The door shut behind her. For a stupid split second, I felt like my mate had abandoned me in the shit. Reminded myself: Conway wasn’t my mate.

  I got my gloves back on, started searching. Selena’s phone spilling out of her blazer pocket onto her bed, Julia’s on her bedside table. Rebecca’s on her bed. Holly’s missing.

  I started on the bedside tables. Something about the Julia interview was poking at me. It was stuck in a back corner of my mind, where I couldn’t get my hands on it: something she’d said, that we’d let go by when we should have pounced.

  Julia shaking info in front of us like a shiny dangle, to keep us from questioning Selena. I wondered how far she would go, to protect Selena or what Selena knew.

  No extra phones in the bedside tables. This lot had books, in with the iPods and the hairbrushes and whatever else, but nothing old and nothing with bits cut out. Julia went for crime, Holly was reading The Hunger Games, Selena was halfway through Alice i
n Wonderland, Rebecca liked Greek mythology.

  Liked old stuff. I didn’t know the poem above her bed—I don’t know poetry the way I wish I did, just whatever they had down the library when I was a kid, whatever I pick up when I get the odd chance—but it looked old, Shakespeare-old.

  A Retir’d Friendship

  Here let us sit and bless our Starres

  Who did such happy quiet give,

  As that remov’d from noise of warres.

  In one another’s hearts we live.

  Why should we entertain a feare?

  Love cares not how the world is turn’d.

  If crouds of dangers should appeare,

  Yet friendship can be unconcern’d.

  We weare about us such a charme,

  No horrour can be our offence;

  For mischief’s self can doe no harme

  To friendship and to innocence.

  Katherine Philips

  A kid’s pretty calligraphy, pretty trees and deer woven into the capitals; kid’s need to blaze her love on walls, tell the world. Shouldn’t have hit me, a grown man.

  If I made a card to put up on the Secret Place: me, big grin, in the middle of my mates. Arms around their shoulders and heads leaning together, outlines melded into one. Close as Holly and her lot, unbreakable. The caption: Me and my friends.

  They’d be holes in the paper. Cut out with tiny scissors, tiny delicate snips, perfect to the last loved hair—this guy’s head thrown back laughing, this one’s elbow locked round my neck messing, this one’s arm shooting out as he overbalanced—and not there.

  I said people mostly like me. True; they do, always have. Plenty of people ready to be my mates, always. That doesn’t mean I want to be theirs. A few scoops, a bit of snooker, watch the match, lovely, I’m on. The more than that, the real thing: no. Not my scene.

  It was these girls’ scene, all right. They were diving a mile deep and swimming like dolphins, not a bother on them. Why should we entertain a feare? Nothing could hurt them, not in any way that mattered, not while they had each other.

  The breeze made soft sounds in the curtains. I got my mobile out, dialed the number that had texted me. No answer, no ringing. The phones lay there, dark.

  A sock under Holly’s bed, a violin case under Rebecca’s, nothing else. I started on the wardrobe. I was wrist-deep in soft T-shirts when I felt it: a shift, behind my shoulder, outside in the corridor. A change in the texture of the stillness, a blink across the light through the door-crack.

  I stopped moving. Silence.

  I took my hands out of the wardrobe and turned, nice and casual, just having another read of Rebecca’s poem; not looking at the door or anything. The door-crack was in the corner of my eye. Top half bright, bottom half dark. Someone was behind the door.

  I pulled out my phone, sauntered around messing with it, mind on other things. Got my back up against the wall by the door, out of eyeline. Waited.

  Out in the corridor, nothing moved.

  I went for the handle and had the door thrown open all in one fast move. There was no one there.

  14

  The Valentine’s dance. Two hundred third- and fourth-years from Kilda’s and Colm’s, shaved and waxed and plucked, carefully anointed with dozens of substances in every color and texture, dressed up in their agonized-over best and sky-high on hormones and smelling of two hundred different cans of body spray, crammed into the Kilda’s school hall. Mobile screens bob and flicker blue-white among the crowd, like fireflies, as people record each other recording each other. Chris Harper—there in the middle of the crowd, in the red shirt, shoulder-bumping and laughing with his friends to get the girls’ attention—has three months, a week and a day left to live.

  It’s only half past eight and Julia is bored already. She and the other three are in a tight circle on the dance floor, ignoring the OMG LOL!!! mileage that Joanne’s gang are getting out of Becca’s jeans. Holly and Becca both love dancing so they’re having a blast, and Selena looks happy enough, but Julia is about ready to fake epic period cramps to get out of this. The sound system is banging them over the heads with some love-based song that’s been autotuned to a slick perky shine, Justin Bieber or possibly Miley Cyrus, someone smooth in front and jerking through all the motions of sexy. The lights are flashing red and pink. The committee—shiny-haired gold-star types already working on their CVs—has decorated the hall with lacy paper hearts and garlands and whatever, in predictable colors. The whole place is gloopy with romance, but there are two teachers guarding the door in case some couple decides to sneak out and do unspeakable things in a classroom, and if anyone is wild and crazy enough to start slow-dancing, like for example because a slow song is playing, then insane Sister Cornelius charges over and practically sprays them with a fire hose full of holy water.

  Most people who aren’t on the committee are keeping a careful eye on the hall doors. On the afternoon before a dance, Colm’s guys go down the road behind Kilda’s and throw booze over the corner of the wall into the bushes, where they pick it up later if they manage to sneak out of the dance. The next day, Kilda’s girls scavenge anything that didn’t get collected and get drunk in their dorm rooms. This has been a tradition for so long that Julia can’t believe They haven’t figured it out, specially since two of the teachers actually went to Kilda’s and presumably did the same thing themselves. Miss Long and Miss Naughton both look like they were born forty-year-old Irish teachers in 1952 and haven’t changed anything including their revolting tan tights since, so maybe if they actually ever were teenagers it’s been wiped out of their memories, but just recently Julia has wondered if it’s more complicated than that. If Miss Long and Miss Naughton might be ninety-nine percent dreary teacher and still somehow one percent fifteen-year-old muffling whiskey giggles, and loyal to that. If this is one of the secrets that grown-ups keep unmentioned: how long things last, invisible, inside. Either that or they were such losers back in school that they never heard about the booze bushes.

  Julia dances on autopilot and checks furtively for pit-stains while she’s got her arms up. Last year she enjoyed the Valentine’s dance; or maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the word, but it felt like it mattered. It felt knife-edge, last year, felt breathtaking, felt ready to boil over with its own momentousness. She was expecting it to feel the same way this year, but instead the dance feels like it matters considerably less than your average nose-picking session. This is pissing Julia off. Most of the stuff she does every day is blindingly pointless, but at least no one expects her to enjoy it.

  “Back in a sec,” she yells to the others, miming drinking, and drops out of the dance. She starts squeezing her way through the crowd towards the edge. The lights and the dancing and the crush of bodies have turned everyone sweaty. Joanne Heffernan’s makeup is already melting, which doesn’t surprise Julia given how much of it there is and which doesn’t seem to bother Oisín O’Donovan who is trying to maneuver his hand inside Joanne’s dress and getting frustrated because the dress is complicated and Oisín is thick as shite.

  “OhmyGod, get off me, you lezzer,” snaps Joanne over her shoulder, as Julia tries to slide past without brushing up against one molecule of Joanne’s designer arse.

  “In your dreams,” Julia says, stepping on Joanne’s heel. “Oops.”

  At the end of the hall is a long table of cupid-covered paper cups, arranged in rows around a big fake-glass punch bowl. The punch is a lurid baby-medicine shade of pink. Julia takes a cup. It’s squash with food coloring.

  Finn Carroll is leaning against the wall by the table. Finn and Julia know each other, sort of, from debating society; when he sees her he cocks an eyebrow, lifts his cup to her and shouts something she can’t hear. Finn has bright red hair, long enough to flop into loose curls at the back of his neck, and he’s smart. These would add up to social death for most guys, but Finn has the minimum of freckles to
go with the hair, he’s decent at rugby and he’s getting height and shoulders faster than most of his class, so he gets away with it.

  “What?” Julia yells.

  Finn leans down to her ear. “Don’t drink the punch,” he shouts. “It’s shit.”

  “To go with the music,” Julia yells back.

  “That’s just insulting. ‘They’re teenagers, so they must love shitty chart crap.’ It never occurs to them that some of us might have taste.”

  “You should’ve hotwired the sound system,” Julia yells. Finn is good with electronics. Last term he wired up a frog in Bio so that when Graham Quinn went to dissect it, it jumped, and Graham and his stool both went over backwards. Julia respects that. “Or at least brought something sharp we could stick through our eardrums.”

  Finn says, close enough that he can stop shouting, “Want to see if we can get out?”

  Finn is actually pretty sound, for a Colm’s guy; Julia likes the idea of having an honest-to-God conversation with him, she thinks there’s a decent chance he might be able to manage that without spending too much of the time trying to stick his tongue down her throat, and she can’t see him bragging to all his moron buddies that they had hot monkey sex in the bushes. Someone will notice they’re gone, though, and the hot-monkey-sex rumors will get going anyway. “Nah,” she says.

  “I’ve got a naggin of whiskey out the back.”

  “I hate whiskey.”

  “So we’ll nick something else. There’s a whole offie out in those bushes. Take your pick.”

  The colored lights slide across Finn’s face, wide mouth laughing. It occurs to Julia, with a giddy rush, that she doesn’t have to give one single fuck about hot-monkey-sex rumors.

  She glances over at the other three: still dancing. Becca has her arms out and is twirling around with her head back like a little kid, laughing. Any minute she’s going to get dizzy and fall over her own feet.

  “Stick beside me,” Julia says to Finn, and starts sauntering casually towards the hall door. “When I say ‘Go,’ go fast.”

  Sister Cornelius is being cuboid and grim in front of the door; Miss Long is off down the other end of the hall, unsticking Marcus Wiley from Cliona, who looks like she’s not sure which of them she hates more. Sister Cornelius gives Julia and Finn a suspicious glare. Julia smiles back. “The punch is lovely,” she shouts, raising her cup. Sister Cornelius looks even more suspicious.